The Diary of a Bookseller

WEDNESDAY, 17 SEPTEMBER

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Bethan was in again today.

As we were going through the last of the boxes from the Haugh of Urr deal, Bethan came across a copy of The Collected Poems of Kathleen Raine. Ordinarily I would expect to know little or nothing about most of the authors whose works are on our shelves, but Kathleen Raine is someone whom I learned a little about when I was buying books from an elderly man who lived near Penpont, about forty miles from Wigtown. Six years ago he had telephoned me to tell me that he was selling his books, so I drove to his house – an attractive laird’s house with an Andy Gold-sworthy sculpture in the garden. Before I started to work my way through his substantial library, we sat down to a pot of soup which he had made, and over which he explained that he had recently been diagnosed with terminal leukaemia. He was clearly struggling to accept the diagnosis, repeatedly telling me that two years previously, on his seventy-fifth birthday, he had climbed Kilimanjaro. His wife had died some years ago, and he had obviously expected to live considerably longer than the medical experts had now told him he could reasonably expect. There was a clear and understandable sense of injustice and anger in his language. Of his library of about six thousand books I bought about 800, and paid him £1,200. The most interesting thing among it was a letter to him from Kathleen Raine, which he had used as a bookmark in Gavin Maxwell’s Ring of Bright Water. When he produced this and showed it to me, I had to confess that I had never heard of Kathleen Raine, so he explained that she and Maxwell had been good friends until, during a visit to Camusfearna (his home at Sandaig on the west coast of Scotland), he banished her from the house during a storm in 1956. Raine cursed Maxwell under a rowan tree in the garden. She blamed all his subsequent misfortunes – which were swift and many – on this curse and believed that Maxwell’s friends also blamed her for the series of disasters that befell him. The letter in the copy of Ring of Bright Water was a reply to an invitation to the opening of the Gavin Maxwell memorial at Monreith, near where Maxwell grew up. Raine turned down the invitation because she believed that Maxwell’s friends would be hostile towards her. The elderly man died within a few months of selling me his books.

There was a reported sighting of Captain at the Martyrs’ Stake car park, at the bottom of Wigtown hill. Anna set off straight away and returned with him. Clearly the cat found at the tennis court yesterday was not Captain, which would explain why he started scratching the well-meaning woman who attempted to relocate him.

No sign of the swallows on the wires any more.

Till total £158.50

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